wilflare, I haven't found any problems with GC. I have all the achievements correctly attributed, including the Mister Universe achievement Now that Selachii has so eloquently explained all the player ship weaponry, I'm going to try and list all the Alpha Strikes (by color), with helpful decriptions: 1. Orange - This is a dumb-fire alpha strike, delivering a constant stream of heavy damage lasting about 2-3 seconds. The stream is pretty narrow, so you have to move around if you want to use this alpha strike to destroy more turrets other than the one you were just under. This means you will likely recieve less pickups from this alpha strike than a homing one. On the other hand, this is great for taking care of a pesky turret or turret combination, as the stream can be guided to one stop easily. 2. Purple - This is another dumb-fire alpha strike, but it delivers the same dps as the Orange in a wider span but a shorter time period. It barely lasts a second, so you will need to be correctly positioned to put this to full use. Again, this is great for taking out a specific turret, or turret nest. 3. Pink/Magenta - This one lies somewhere between turret homing and dumb-fire. The alpha strike fires off homing lasers from your ship dealing direct and constant damage to enemy ships in view. The lasers home in on turrets, but only to a limit, something that Selachii might be able to explain... in my upcoming monster question post. This alpha strike is great for crowd control, hunting down Scouts sporting some very threatening turret combos later on. It can also save your bacon sometimes when facing a Warlord or Reaper, as the turret-centric damage can often generate a lot of health pickups. If no ship is around no lasers are fired, but the time period still clocks out. 4. Yellow/Gold - This is my favorite alpha strike, I rate it the highest, but this might be a personal preference only. This launches some very pretty looking turret-homing missiles. I think they can be seen as super-charged version of homing missiles that Phoenix uses. The extremely focused attack on turrets means a lot of health drops, and possibly even some nice pickups. The health drops can be so numerous that they might get you about 75% health in case you are up against a Reaper/Warlord/Revenant. One more feature that makes this deadly is that the missiles go off screen when no enemy is around, but if the ship shows up about half a second later, it will STILL get hit by the missiles. How cool is that?! In all, my preference for pickups lies as such: Health > EMP > Yellow/Gold > Pink/Magenta > Shield > Purple > Orange I give shield such a low rating because for me it often runs out and I am still more or less in the same position I was before. I'd rather shoot off a well guided Alpha Strike.
Ok, now a gargantuan, mammoth, behemoth questionnaire/interview for Selachii, with most questions that I think haven't been asked since the original thread started: 1. How does the overall scoring system work? How do EMPs come into the scoring system? On the site it says EMP'd bullets are worth more points. 2. Do all Alpha Strikes have same total damage? 3. Do all enemy bullets carry same damage (other than bullet bombs) ? 4. What are the pickup drop rates and are they affected by any factors such as which ship you're using? What is the small health drop rate for a turret? 5. How many unique areas does the game have right now? How many more have you planned/considered? 6. What sort of restrictions does the game apply when creating turret combinations for ships and waves? 7. How many total upgrade + weapon add-ons are possible in one run? Does the total dps after maximum pickups end below Alpha Strike dps or above? 8. Why isn't the shield a perfect circle? 9. Have you considered introducing scrape mechanics or a bullet cancelling Alpha Strike? 10. Have you considered introducing a Boss ship that shows up at regular score intervals? It could appear at every 1mil or 1/3/5... mil and have different turret loadouts at each encounter. It would differ from the usual Harpy in that it cannot be destroyed but simply retreats after you destroy its turrets. And it could look more menacing. I hope you can answer a few if not all of these questions PS: Forgot to report a bug earlier, there's cracking in the audio when big enemy ships explode.
Phoenix HD 1.0.3 is live, fixing the issue with iOS 4.1 and 4.2. We've also deployed Phoenix 1.2.3 along side. sapphire_neo, that's a great list of questions and I will answer them all, probably later today, there are some tasks I need to do first The question about the scoring will be a separate reply, I will make an article about it. Part of the scoring I posted in the original "phoenix upcoming shooter" thread here on TA, but I will rewrite it with updated info.
Yay, trouble-free Phoenix HD on my touch4g now Looking forward to your answers Selachii and the scoring article.
it's a big problem for ipad/ipad2 users, i played it on ipad 2,the graphic is stunning~but like you said there are 2 black bars at left and right side~~~it does affect the left/right movement,become slower,cant keep up with my finger~~~is there going to be the right screen resolution PHOENIX HD for ipad2?cant play this new version until iphone5 come out
"Selachii Senior Member iPhone 3G, OS 3.x Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: Netherlands Posts: 158 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Phoenix HD on the ipad has 2 thin black bars on the sides, indeed to keep the same aspect ratio as the iPhone. We 'need' to do this to keep the gameplay exactly the same across devices. If the iPad playfield would be wider, it would impact the scores of iPad players and thus be unfair (regardless of it being an advantage or disadvantage). It is not because we are being cheap or lazy, suggestions for the empty black areas are welcome! " ====================================== it's a big problem for ipad/ipad2 users, i played it on ipad 2,the graphic is stunning~but like you said there are 2 black bars at left and right side~~~it does affect the left/right movement,become slower,cant keep up with my finger~~~is there going to be the right screen resolution PHOENIX HD for ipad2?cant play this new version until iphone5 come out
The black bars are there to maintain parity with the iPhone aspect ratio, so that Phoenix HD iPad users can compete directly with iPhone/iPod Touch users on the leaderboards. The black bars don't annoy me at all, let alone being a "big problem". And I have never seen any lagging in controls, the ship follows my finger perfectly. Selachii's comment on the black bars "big problem" of black bars, and on things seeming "slower"
"The black bars are there to maintain parity with the iPhone aspect ratio, so that Phoenix HD iPad users can compete directly with iPhone/iPod Touch users on the leaderboards. The black bars don't annoy me at all, let alone being a "big problem". And I have never seen any lagging in controls, the ship follows my finger perfectly." ============================ the ship doesnt follow my finger when i move to the left/right on ipad2~~~up/down is all good~
Works perfectly fine for me, my 4.3mil score (average by leaderboard standards) with the Mirage is testament to that. Any perceptible lag is identical to the lag between finger movement and ship movement seen in the original Phoenix, and Phoenix HD on the iPhone. This lag is of course due to a speed limitation on the player ship. It's not meant to move at the speed of light -.-
I will get back to you on this with a big scoring article. Not exactly, but roughly. Each Alpha Strike has its own character and strength, but an Alpha Strike is about 10x as powerful as your normal damage output. Yes, an enemy projectile does 10 damage (you have 100 hit points). Bombs (mirvs as we call them) are 50 damage before detonation. The droprate is done with a complex time-based algorithm. Hence it doesn't matter if you are killing small scouts or big enemies. The drop rate can not be influenced in any way and is equal across all pick-ups. The Small health that drops from a turret depends on the strength of a turret. There is a cap on the amount of health a ship can drop, this amount is distributed over the turrets according to how strong they are. 3. As many as we find time and inspiration for We prototyped a lot of backgrounds for Phoenix HD, most were dismissed as they were too busy or lacked character. I will dig up some screenshots of unreleased assets sometime. Basically we setup the turret mounts to be eligible for certain classes of turrets, which we picked in advance. While you are playing, random combinations are build to: a) pick turrets from the correct class for each mount. b) make sure the total turret strength matches the current player level. Yes there is a hidden 'player level'. The level determines how strong your encounter is. In the early versions of Phoenix, the level was actually displayed at the top of the screen The number was pretty useless to show though, as it is not directly related to score and is hard to compare to progress. (this will also come forward from the scoring article) There are roughly 20 weapon upgrades per ship. The Alpha Strikes scale up in power along with your own weapons, so they always retain their awesome dps relative to your weapons. it isn't? :X Yes, scrape/graze and similar bullet hell/danmaku mechanics are in our little development box. Maybe sometime a ship that relies on this will pop out. Who knows!? Yes, the Harpy sort of started out like this, but the gameplay evolved a lot during its beta stages. We gave it a low, but random, spawning rate so it would be a bit more 'fresh'. Having true milestone encounters is nice, but I'm not sure if we'll go there with this game. Some crackling should be there, the other might be your speaker? It sounds bad with headphones as well? I hope you are satisfied with these answers, feel free to ask more.
wow... I just wanted to say that adding a ship or some sort of mechanic that brings grazing into the equation of score and even a grazing multiplier would be FRIGGIN AWESOME!!! I mean OUT OF THIS ENTIRE WORLD FRIGGIN GREAT!!! Something I would pay even more for... So even if it's just applied to one ship, that ship would pretty much be an entirely new mode of the game... if that's done, hopefully you'll work something out with the leaderboards, as having a grazing multiplier would drastically change the top scores... =oP
The drop rates still bug me a little, because sometimes I won't get an EMP for an entire run and sometimes I'll get 3 EMPs from the same ship (yes, this has actually happened) =/ And although you say the rates aren't affected by ship choice, I seem to get better pickups from the Mirage :shrug: I'm sure everyone here would love to see the cut areas For the turrets, do you meant there are some preset turret combinations? What I really wanted to know was does the game take care to not create a combination that can create impenetrable bullet walls? It's great that Alpha Strike dps scales... which I should have realized I guess >_> The shield looks more like a hexadecagon =/ It'll be awesome if you introduce new core gameplay mechanics like scrape in a special ship! And it would totally fit with the extra ships having special features, the Corsair's lock-on and Mirage's Nightfury Now that I went back and listened closely to the explosion sample through headphones I can tell the "cracking" is actually small sharp explosions, it just sounds a little ugly coming through the iPad speaker. Maybe you can rework it a little? A new question, what's your position on using new colors for player ship weapons and enemy bullets? I noticed you actually changed the yellow fast stream bullets from the original build in favor of more red bullets. And Phoenix's arsenal is completely blue/purple, Mirage's is similar. Even the Corsair has a blue torpedo, although its machine gun and other arsenal is more unique. Maybe some green weapons for the next iAP ship? And will the current ships' arsenal ever receive an upgrade in updates? Looking forward to your scoring article now
syntheticvoid, I think the graze/scrape mechanic will be used to charge a super weapon, like the Nightfury in the new ship. Or maybe a shield/wingmen? I'm sure they won't implement a straight score multiplier for an extra ship.
